THE prestigious Nobel Prize is awarded every year to the good, the great and the talented. But what about the inventors whose theories don't exactly rock the world? Who gives them a pat on the back? Today we salute the whacky, crazy boffins and their hard work. ANTONIA HOYLE looks at a new book called IgNobel Prizes and finally recognises these sad scientific souls...

FOOD

WATCHING tadpoles swimming around a pond, everyone must have asked themselves: "I wonder what they taste like?"

Richard Wassersug of Dalhousie University, Canada, has not only answered that question, but also found which tadpoles taste nastiest AND which bits of tadpoles are most yucky.

Wassersug wanted to know why brightly-coloured tadpoles from Costa Rica weren't eaten by their predators. He persuaded 11 students to taste different breeds of tadpole, and rate the flavour of their skin, tails and bodies.

The conclusion? The body tastes nastiest, and the brighter-coloured the tadpole, the more unpleasant it was to chew.

GRAVITY

DROP a piece of toast and it ALWAYS falls butter side down - true or false? Robert Matt-hews from Aston University, asked more than 1,000 schoolchildren to drop a piece and find out. Out of 9,821 drops, 62 per cent (6,101) of the slices landed butter side down. Accepting the award, Matt-hews, said: "There is a more serious side to my work, I just can't remember what it is."

MEDICINE:

WHY do adolescents pick their noses? How common is it? And what do they do with the "nasal matter" that they find? These burning issues are a problem no longer thanks to the tireless work of Chittaranjan Andrade from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India.

Singlehandedly, he surveyed 200 teenagers and discovered that nose-picking is... common among young people.

Accepting the award, Dr Andrade said: "Some people poke their nose into other people's business. I poked my nose into other people's noses. Thank you."

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

PEOPLE always say: I'm crazy about you", but it has never been proven - until now.

Thanks to Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi and Giovanni Cassano from the University of Pisa, Italy, we know that people really do feel nuts about each other.

They discovered that falling in love is the same as suffering from a severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

They examined 20 OCD sufferers and 20 loved-up people, and found that both groups had similar amounts of the mood-enhancing chemical serotonin in their blood. Their scientific conclusion was that being in love leads to an abnormal state - giving a whole new meaning to the term "love sick".

SCIENCE

MANY of you must have wondered what would happen if a cat's ear mite jumped into your ear. Wonder no more.

Vet Robert A. Lopez from Westport, New York tried it.

He spent 11 weeks putting the mites in his own ear and recording their scratching, biting and feeding habits. He found mite activity was heaviest between midnight and 3am, explaining in his acceptance speech: "I hate the old didactic mite. All he does is crawl and bite. At sleeping time he acts like a bum, and crawls right into your ear drum."

Nerd Chris Niswander from Tuscan, Arizona came up with this vital software that can tell the difference between a cat paw and human fingers on the computer keys.

When a cat touches the keyboard, loud harmonica music blasts out, the keys stop working and a message flashes on the screen: "CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED". Now however did you live without it?

PSYCHOLOGY

WE'VE all told jokes that were greeted with total silence. Don't worry, it wasn't your fault... your audience are just thick. American researchers David Dunning and Justin Kreuger drew up a list of "funny" and "unfunny" jokes, then asked 65 people to rate them. They found that those who couldn't tell funny from unfunny, THOUGHT that they were brilliant at picking out the top jokes. So it seems that your stories may have been a hoot after all.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

WHAT is the key to Canadian life? The Mounties? The Rockies? The Great Lakes? Nope. None of those. It's doughnuts.

Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, discovered this truth by studying Canadian doughnut shops. His PhD thesis says: "In England, people go to the pub to socialise; in Canada they go to the doughnut shop."

He adds taking pride in their doughnuts will help Canadians differentiate themselves from Americans.

REPRODUCTION

GIRLS! Wouldn't it be good if you could tell how much a man was packing in his trousers just by looking at his height or the size of his feet?

Well two Canadian boffins - Jerald Bain and Kerry Siminoski - thought so and wrote a long report called: "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length and Foot Size."

They tackled the problem by measuring 63 men in all three departments. and after all their lengthy work, came to the startling conclusion that... you can't.

Bain said: "It would be foolish for any woman to try to judge the size of the penis in this way."

PEACEFUL EXPLOSIONS

ROYAL Navy bosses had a real problem when they ran out of cash to buy shells but still had to train new recruits to fire warship guns on HMS Cambridge in Plymouth, Devon.

What could they do? Fortunately, the top brass were as ingenious as the men who helped Britannia to rule the waves.

No problem, they decreed, then ordered puzzled sailors to load the guns, aim - then shout: "BANG!" into a microphone instead of firing. Now what could be more realistic than that?

For some strange reason, the Royal Navy declined to accept their award in 2000, and the IgNobel Board are still trying to find someone in the Navy to deliver it to.